Lord Adair Turner, the former head of Britain's financial
regulator, says the prospect of Donald Trump becoming president
of the US this week is "far more worrying" than Brexit.

In an interview with Business Insider, Lord Turner said: "I
didn’t want Brexit to occur but I think compared with Trump,
Brexit is quite a minor thing in some ways.

"The fact that it is still at least possible that on Tuesday the
American people will elect a racist, sexist buffoon — actually
much more dangerous than buffoon. I think he’s a threat to world
peace and a threat to the American constitution."

Despite Lord Turner's strong anti-Trump views, the former
regulator and business leader says he understands why many
Americans support the billionaire.

He told Business Insider: "This has happened in part because a
lot of Americans feel they’re not getting their share of the
growing American economy. And they’re absolutely right. The
bottom 25% of the American wage earners haven’t received a real
wage increase for the better part of 30 years. With that
concentrated in particular towns, particular areas, particular
rural areas that feel their whole industry is being stripped out
— you are bound to produce a reaction.

"The danger is that then generates very strong protectionism or
just uncertainty and then business is a bit more cautious and you
get a further twist to the problem of subdued demand and economic
malaise."

Lord Adair
Turner.Reuters/Stephen
Hird

Lord Turner believes similar economic inequalities contributed to
the Brexit vote earlier this year. He say: "As a speech by Andy
Haldane [the Bank of England's Chief Economist] in
June this year called ‘Who’s recovery?’ set out, over the
last 8 years wealth holders in the UK have seen their wealth go
up 40% and GDP per capita has hardly gone up at all. Not
surprisingly then, you have a lot of people who don’t feel that
the system is working of them, some of whom then voted for
Brexit."

He told Business Insider that problems were evident outside of
just Britain and the US, saying: "I think Europe is doing it too.
Europe is doing OK-ish this year but not well enough to bring
down unemployment or create a sense for the Italian people or the
French people that they’re heading in the direction they want.
That then could produce in Italy a rejection of this referendum
that Renzi’s put forward, that could mean the resignation of
Renzi, it might just produce a Five Start government."

Lord Turner added: "And of course in France, we could see a
startlingly high vote for Marine Le Pen and the National Front in
the elections next year. All of that tends to then have an
adverse effect on business certainty which adds an extra twist to
the problems of economic malaise which created the political
uncertainty. This loop between the politics and the economics is
I think very concerning."

Lord Turner ran the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) in
the mid-1990s, before becoming vice chairman of Merrill Lynch
Europe from 2000 to 2006. He then served as head of the UK's
former financial watchdog the Financial Service Authority from
2008 to 2013, taking the jobs on the eve of the global financial
crisis sparked by the US mortgage security bubble.

Lord Turner is now chairman of George Soros' economic think thank
the Institute for New Economic Thinking and this year authored
"Between Debt and the Devil" on the global financial crisis.